From Rock 'N' Roll To Rehab

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His Solo Album Bears An Emotional Tone With A Sense Of Overwhelming Release.

July 2, 2001|By Richard Cromelin, Los Angeles Times

Mick has his Keith. Axl had his Slash. Bono has his Edge. And in Jane's Addiction, Perry Farrell had his Dave Navarro.

These are the guitar-hero sidekicks, the foils to the front men, tight-lipped conjurers who let their fingers do their talking. Not too often does one step out of that role with a substantial words-and-music statement of his own, but more than 10 years after Los Angeles legend Jane's Addiction broke up, Navarro is finally ready to give it a shot.

His just-released solo album, Trust No One, bears some of his old band's majesty and mystery, but its emotional signature is a sense of overwhelming release, as if the musician has popped the lid on a lifetime of compressed pain.

"In Jane's I never specifically spoke words," Navarro says during lunch at a West Hollywood health-food restaurant. "I've always had my guitar as an avenue of creativity and expression, but it's obviously less specific. This is the first opportunity I've had to actually speak about what it is I've gone through.

"I've been asked by a lot of people, `Why has it taken you so long, why haven't you done it before?' I just have to trust that there's some kind of spiritual rule at play here. It's not that I haven't tried to force these things for a long time, so it's almost in spite of my actions I'm here, whether I like it or not."

Now that he has the opportunity, he isn't being shy about it. In addition to the album, he's assembling a book, the tentatively titled Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro, that documents a chilling descent into drugged numbness.

Navarro, now 33 and drug free, has more than his generation's usual list of goblins to blame. There was also the murder of his mother when he was 13, a trauma that drove him to escape into music and drugs and left him unable to connect with people emotionally -- hence the album title.

But now that he's on the other side, he's reaching saturation with the "poor me" victim role.

"I didn't have the foresight to know that years later I'd still be discussing it," he says. "Because I feel like I've hammered the darkness enough, and where I'm at now is what's really exciting to me. I've gotten a sense from a lot of people that they're wondering why I'm not the over-the-top rock guitar player guy anymore."

Navarro still looks the part, the rock 'n' roll buccaneer with a goatee, bandanna and earrings, his black tank top baring tattoo-covered arms. He comes to this sprouts 'n' salad emporium every day -- sometimes twice a day, he says. That's just one measure of the changes in his life. There's also the daily workout at the gym, and a fondness for browsing in bookstores, going to the movies with his girlfriend of seven months and playing low-stakes poker at a casino in Commerce.

All of which is safer, if less ink-worthy, than shooting up while driving a car, or drawing and injecting a partner's blood during sex, or, in a paranoid moment, picking up a shotgun and confronting a utility crew doing a late-night repair on the street outside his Hollywood Hills house.

Navarro and co-author Neil Strauss, who also co-wrote Marilyn Manson's best-selling The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, recount these and other episodes in Don't Try This at Home, a book for HarperCollins' Regan Books that documents the final year of Navarro's latest term as a heavy drug user.

Navarro has been clean and then relapsed before, so he knows the drill.

"Ultimately what I learned was that I was just a very fear-based guy who had a lot of bad experiences and was looking back on the past and living as a result of those fears.

"If I used my past experiences to foretell my own future, I was sunk, and that's what I was doing, and I have to catch myself doing it now. I'm in no way cured. It's a daily self-check-in that I've got to do."